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If you run an e-commerce store using any of today’s popular platforms, you’ve got access to a tremendous amount of data. Your customer insights, marketing, and merchandising data offer untold opportunities for boosting revenue and growing your business – but only if you’re reading and acting on that data appropriately.

Unfortunately, only about 20% of online retailers are actually making use of their analytics. The majority of e-commerce business owners rarely check their analytics, and most aren’t tracking important metrics like customer conversions, behaviors, and goals.

If the extent of your analytics use is keeping tabs on traffic counts, then you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

If you have Google Analytics installed and you use an e-commerce platform like Shopify, here are some specific data points to watch to get more sales and grow your business.

Customers are using those mobile devices to shop, so tracking their use in your store could be critical to boosting conversions. User experience testing could reveal friction points with various mobile devices that impede conversions.

"With close to 40 percent of Internet activity generated via mobile devices, it's critical to understand which devices are being used to access your website," says Bill Elward, CIO, Castle Ink. "Be sure to look at conversion funnels and bounce rates by device for your key conversion pages as it could highlight issues such as page load [times] and layout [problems]."

2. Social Referrers

Shopify’s social referrers report shows top social channels sending traffic to your store. You can use this to validate any social campaigns you’re running, and also to reveal where your audience is talking about and sharing your products or brand. You can also use Google’s own Social Reports with your analytics.

“With all of the advances in website reporting, many of us are still behind the curve when it comes to attributing the return on social media efforts,” says Nathan Mendenhall, Social Manager at Cendyn/ONE. “Sometimes it’s very difficult to connect the dots and see where social media is making an impact for your brand.”

Visit the social sites sending you traffic, search out your brand and products, and join the discussion (monitoring tools can be a big help here). Improve engagement on those channels, and consider setting up or refining paid ads to target that active audience. If you’re already active on those channels, improve the depth and value of your content to create more engagement opportunities.

3. Top Products

Shopify has a “top products” report tracking which products are most popular with your audience. Since these products are already moving well, promote them to get them in front of a larger audience.

Get user-generated content including images or videos of the products being used to promote on social media

Conversely, compare your top products to products that aren’t moving. Are there on-page elements you can improve to lift conversions? Try promoting underperforming products to help drive sales.

4. Conversions

You can track conversions in your Google Analytics as well as through your e-commerce platform. Shopify breaks down conversions into products added to cart, customer clicks to checkout, and finally the completion of a checkout (purchase).

Another major warning signal here occurs when you have lots of traffic, but few additions to cart. Something is preventing customers from adding products to their cart – whether it’s price, lack of trust established, poor product descriptions, weak images, or some other user experience issue. Audit your pages to see where you can improve customer engagement.

5. Website Cart Analysis

Cart analysis is an important feature of most e-commerce platforms; with Shopify, you can analyze the carts of past customers to identify trends in purchase habits and behaviors.

6. Top Landing Pages

Next, look for your top landing pages report in both your store analytics and your Google Analytics reports. Use this data to discover the most popular landing pages on your site, as well as those that are underperforming.

On your top pages, introduce calls to action to drive traffic to relevant products or to promote special offers. Leverage those top pages as the entrance to your funnel to grow your list for future marketing and promotions.

And in the case of low-performance pages, pay close attention to visitor flow and engagement metrics like time on page within your Google Analytics to see how those top pages perform once the traffic lands on your site. You may find easy opportunities to convert underperforming pages into winners.

"Look for pages with higher traffic and high bounce rates relative to your other pages," says Steve Lamar, vice president, SEO Production, Volume 9. "Pages with high bounce rates can indicate a problem with the information, layout, or call to actions. Use bounce rates as an initial indicator of problem pages."

7. Site Search Data

Make sure you’re monitoring the search queries on your site using Google Analytics Site Search and the corresponding report within your e-commerce platform. Data from on-site searches will show you exactly what your customers are looking for, giving you insight into their needs and the products or information they want.

This is an easy way to discover products you can feature, or growth opportunities for products your customers want that you don’t offer yet. You can also use that data to improve your product listings and to connect more visitors to the products they’re looking for.

8. Goal Conversions

Set up goal conversions in your Google Analytics account to track specific actions – like a click on a call to action – to determine how effective those CTAs are on various pages. If you don’t have the volume of traffic necessary for traditional split testing, this can be an effective method of testing the placement, presentation, and content of a CTA to increase conversions.

How do you use analytics in your e-commerce business? Do you check them regularly and adjust your strategies based on the data? Share your approach with me in the comments below:

Sujan is the co-founder of Web Profits, a growth marketing agency, and a partner in a handful of software companies including Mailshake, Pick.co, Quuu,…

Sujan is the co-founder of Web Profits, a growth marketing agency, and a partner in a handful of software companies including Mailshake, Pick.co, Quuu, and Linktexting.com Between his consulting practice and his software companies, Sujan’s goal is to help entrepreneurs and marketers scale their businesses.